Unreleased Amiga chipset better than anything today?

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Promilus

What is the other factor you might take into consideration when deeming machine as successful or not? Was C128 failure with over 2mln units sold? Was A600 successful with less than 200,000? Well... there's scale to look at. C64 was sold with over 12M units so that makes C128 fairly successful. There were ~4M A500 sold worldwide which makes A600 much bigger flop than C128. That's all I was going to say.

Securing the future. The C128 was intended to march on Apple and IBM business but finally there have never been any specific softwares exploiting the promises to really compete with them, excepting the BBS one.



On Bil Herd site we can read: "Last I heard, CBM delayed the release of the C128D for a couple of years which makes no sense. By that I mean why put resources into a system years after it's release when the Amiga should be the reigning computer."

This is really incredible and coherent with what I witnessed at the time, the C128D coming very late and so living very short in the shelf.

[Promilus]

That line didn't have one. Same as Amiga. They did put Z80 to allow CP/M which was already giving out it's last breath so it didn't matter. They didn't really allow both processors to run at the same time. They messed up with VDC and they messed up with using good old VIC II. And it still did sell well despite being messed up design. And that's because it had fairly useful BASIC version (unlike C64), also monitor program built in. Did I mention faster floppy? Yeah... It DID matter!

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by idrougge

A lot of Amiga owners despaired when they couldn't run a web browser in 8-bit colour in a flicker-free screen mode without the screen stealing so much DMA that the modem stuttered.

Not me. I only got an internet connection in 2007

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TEG

You are nitpicking, most sales where done with the coin case but I don't either understand why Bruce wrote "The C128 didn't have a floppy drive." It have its own floppy drive, two in fact, the 1570 and the 1571.

Floppy drive was an optional extra - an expensive one. Due to all stuff it needed inside, they couldn't cut production costs like they did on the C64. In the end the high price of the disk drive killed the C64.

Yeah, again, it's true from a selling point of view and it was a lovely machine but I think, in the context, Bruce want to say it does not fulfil the expectations. It was used mainly in C64 mode instead of really bringing a new set of dedicated software using the new cpu, the additional memory and the new 80 columns i.e the C128 mode.

I had experience with a C128 once, in 1987. A customer had brought his brand new C128 back to the shop my friend operated (where I bought my A1000 soon after) complaining about 'jail bars' on the display. I was 400km away from home and couldn't test it in my workshop, so I hired an oscilloscope and did some probing around the motherboard. Sadly there was nothing I could do to fix it, as the problem was occurring inside the VIC chip. Needless to say the customer wasn't happy, but felt a lot better after we agreed to swap it for a C64 and change. Turns out he was only playing games anyway, and the C64 was a better match to his needs.

This time the screwup was with the conception of the new video chip not providing an IRQ.

That wasn't the only screwup. The whole design was a kludge.

To note, C128D is the best for Bil Herd: "C128D is my favorite" and he was assuming the C128 would sold only for one year when he made it.

The C128D was ready in 1985, but the launch was delayed because it clashed with the Amiga 1000. This made perfect sense. What didn't make sense was making it at all. They could make more money out of the Amiga.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Speak for yourself. A lot of Amiga owners despaired when they couldn't run a web browser in 8-bit colour in a flicker-free screen mode without the screen stealing so much DMA that the modem stuttered.

Right. AGA can display up to 16 colors in hires no flicker without DMA contention. 33k6 MODEMs arrived in 1996, but most people were using 28k8 or even 14k4 as the faster ones were expensive. I had a 'Beta release' Netcom 33k6 MODEM on my A1200, and ran an 8 color screen without a problem. But then I had a 50MHz 030 with 16MB FastRAM. IBrowse needed at least 1MB of free FastRAM, which realistically meant at least 2MB and preferably more. You couldn't run it on a stock A1200.

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0 for Windows 95 in August 1995. Minimum system requirements were 8MB RAM and an 80386 CPU, but realistically you needed a 486 (I had a 386DX-40 running Windows 95 in 16 colors and it was sluggish, much slower than my A1200).

Amiga owners with serial port envy needn't have despaired, as several solutions were available. There was the Surf Squirrel and Whippet for A1200 PCMCIA, Hypercom and other boards for the clockport, and many serial port cards for 'big box' amigas. Some accelerator cards like the GVP GForce 040 came with an onboard buffered serial port.

BTW I still have my original copy of IBrowse complete with box and manuals. This gave me a small discount when I upgraded to the latest version that I use on the A1200 today. I have been using a CNET PCMCIA Ethernet card since 1997 when I developed the original driver for it. Using Roadshow I get typical download speeds of 130kB/s, more than 20 times faster than the fastest dial up MODEM you could get (56k).

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

33k6 MODEMs arrived in 1996, but most people were using 28k8 or even 14k4 as the faster ones were expensive.

Glad I missed that

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Glad I missed that

You would be glad to have missed $10 per MB data charges too.

Ihug aims for the sky

Splitting from Iconz in early 1995 was a turning point for Ihug, with Tim Wood selling up what assets were left in the Pelican nightclub and cyber cafe to join his brother Nick in the new business venture...

The focus remained on being a domestic provider. Users were charged a set-up fee and a monthly fee of around $10 per megabyte to start with...

Sometimes the system would go down for several hours at a time but without serious competition everyone just took it in their stride. “Imagine looking after 500 run-of-the mill dial-up modems. One or two would die each day and you had to check them all every day to make sure they were working. It was a big hassle. Every one of those modems represented a single Telecom line. We used up all the analogue copper lines in the street at one point,” said Whitmore.

Before the internet many people in New Zealand were running BBS's, linked to the rest of the world through Fidonet. I had two telephone lines in my shop (one voice, one fax), which were switched through to our BBS after hours, running on an Amiga 2000 with extra serial ports. We had 'blazing fast' 9600bd modems that cost NZ$1000 retail in 1991. In that same year Supra Corporation introduced their 14400bd modem for a similar price, and in 1994 their first 28k8 model.

People today have no idea how good they have it. Or do they? Data transfer rates were so low back then that websites couldn't afford to have extraneous stuff on them. Now many websites are so full of advertising it's almost impossible to view the content!

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

You would be glad to have missed $10 per MB data charges too.

Wow I got my first internet connection in 2007 and paid ~4.50 euros per month for 10 megabit/sec up and downstream no limit.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Perfect argumentation, glad it was you who wrote it, this will prevent us to have very long discussion.
Btw don't forget EGA has 64KB, VGA 256KB - 512KB dedicated almost fully for graphics seem to be quite reasonable.

Not exactly dedicated; my brother who was a musician hated his A2000A because he could not meaningfully work in Protracker.

Btw ALU size means nothing - you can do all processing over 1 bit ALU if you need, Z80 use 4 bit ALU but no one advertise it as 4/8 bit.

True. "Bits" are mostly of importance to console marketers — which, incidentally, is what made the CD32 look so pale compared to competitors which only claimed to have 16 "bits".

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by pandy71

You triggered my curiosity - please tell us about your experience using web browser on 1MB 386SX 16..25MHz without cache (16 colors VGA).

I never did — because any 386 was outdated by the time WWW access was available to the masses.

But I did use a Mac II to access the web and it did work a whole lot better than my Amiga, sadly.

The Amiga's problem was that it was stuck with 386-era performance in the age of web browsers which demanded high colour depths — which the Amiga's internal chipset couldn't handle.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Right. AGA can display up to 16 colors in hires no flicker without DMA contention.

Note that I wrote "8 bitplanes", not "8 colours". Can you even imagine browsing the web in 16 colours? Did PC users browse the web in 16 colours?

Amiga owners with serial port envy needn't have despaired, as several solutions were available. There was the Surf Squirrel and Whippet for A1200 PCMCIA, Hypercom and other boards for the clockport, and many serial port cards for 'big box' amigas. Some accelerator cards like the GVP GForce 040 came with an onboard buffered serial port.

The Surf Squirrel was a rather late release, and one which you either didn't need on the PC or one for which a much cheaper PC alternative was available. The others involved voiding your warranty, and were also released by the time no more Amigas were being produced, and few Amiga owners remained at that time. I remember reading about the HyperCom in an online publication, and by that time, such publications were only aimed at Amiga die-hards like you and I.

BTW I still have my original copy of IBrowse complete with box and manuals. This gave me a small discount when I upgraded to the latest version that I use on the A1200 today. I have been using a CNET PCMCIA Ethernet card since 1997 when I developed the original driver for it. Using Roadshow I get typical download speeds of 130kB/s, more than 20 times faster than the fastest dial up MODEM you could get (56k).

I also have an original IBrowse licence and an original CNet card. Who cares?

[grelbfarlk]

Ibrowse worked just fine with an RTG card and and 040. It just wasn't a very compatible browser. Running Shapeshifter with RTG and an 040 was a just fine browsing experience from 94 and on. Until Picasso96 or CybergraphX worked on your RTG card in Workbench it wasn't great.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Note that I wrote "8 bitplanes", not "8 colours". Can you even imagine browsing the web in 16 colours? Did PC users browse the web in 16 colours?

Yes, they did. Most ISA bus cards were painfully slow in 256 colors.

But I browse the web today on TV in 8 colors, and it's fine. IBrowse does an amazing job of dithering images to make them viewable. If I want to view a jpeg in true color I download it and view it separately in HAM8.

The images on most web pages are just eye candy. In the old days this was recognized, and web page designers tried to keep them to a minimum to save precious bandwidth and speed up loading times. When a page might take minutes to load at the best of times this was rather important. The user might not bother if it took too long (an all too frequent occurrence).

Here's a typical website from 1996 (via "The Old Internet"):-

PC Gamer - the World's Bestselling PC and CD-ROM Games Magazine

All the images are GIFs, and most are 'thumbnail' size to reduce bandwidth. This page would look fine in 16 colors.

People often browsed with images turned off to speed up page loading. Before the advent of javascript etc., only text links and image maps were clickable. Most websites avoided image maps, so you could do everything with images turned off. A lot of amateur sites were plastered with animated GIFs too that were very annoying, another reason to turn them off!

The Surf Squirrel was a rather late release, and one which you either didn't need on the PC or one for which a much cheaper PC alternative was available. The others involved voiding your warranty,

The Surf Squirrel was released in 1996, when Amiga Technologies was still selling A1200s. Before that there wasn't much need for a buffered serial port because most people had slower MODEMs, and very few were on the internet. We did frequent bulletin boards a lot though, and once we got internet ftp sites, newsgroups, and email. These tasks didn't need more than 8 colors.

You might void your warranty installing a clockport serial card, but most people's A1200s were out of warranty by then. A dealer could install it legally if you were worried about it. Big box Amigas didn't have a problem with opening the case under warranty because they were designed to have cards installed by the user.

Now might also be be good time to point out that 'serious' Amiga users often had big box machines like the A2000, A3000 and A4000, stuffed with accelerator and I/O cards and even RTG. In the late 90's I had an A3000 with 50MHz 060, 32MB RAM, Ethernet (on ADSL) and Picasso II RTG. I could surf the web just as well as any Pentium PC, except for Netscape specific stuff (so much for the HTML 'standard'!).

I remember reading about the HyperCom in an online publication, and by that time, such publications were only aimed at Amiga die-hards like you and I.

Since Commodore exited the scene in 1994, before the internet took off, 'Amiga diehards' were the only ones browsing the web on the Amiga anyway. But many of us were happy enough doing it slightly slower with less colors, and so didn't need a new serial port. I started with a 14400 MODEM, then 28k8, and finally 33k6. That was fast enough for me.

I also have an original IBrowse licence and an original CNet card. Who cares?

Did you use it? Do you still use it today?

Yeah who cares. Perhaps I should have kept the driver to myself so everybody would think you needed an expensive Amiga specific card.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Wow I got my first internet connection in 2007 and paid ~4.50 euros per month for 10 megabit/sec up and downstream no limit.

Wow. I pay NZ$89 per month today for internet with 'phone' (wireless) and it's capped (at 60GB mind you. I doubt anyone could have used that much per month in 1997).

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The C128D was ready in 1985, but the launch was delayed because it clashed with the Amiga 1000. This made perfect sense. What didn't make sense was making it at all. They could make more money out of the Amiga.

You have a strange way of reading History.

The C128D was NOT here and the A1000 did NOT sell well. So retrospectively you can't say that.

Based on C128 sell number, the C128D would have been on the market from the start, it would have certainly did decent sell and, more important, bring credibility to the Commodore brand because of the professional looking case. And it would have fill a gap in the catalogue as the middle range machine. The Amiga being the high end.

As the mother board was cleverly design from the start to be the same for the C128 and the C128D, it would have not cost much to arrange the production line to output both of the product. 90% of the line would have been shared. I would only have, eventually, provide the 8563 VDC with its whole 64 Ko RAM, so being able to display 16 colours, instead the 16 Ko for the C128 and so the 4 colours. Oh, and I would bundled it with the 1531 mouse.

We have to remember that Jack was no more here at the time and so Gould was the manager. He simply had no clue. Bil Herd explain there was nobody to say them what to do. The management was completely off the mark and so that was engineers who decided what to do of the energy they had in their veins.


And when you think of it, the R&D cost was absolutely low, the team who designed the machine was incredibly small.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by idrougge

I never did — because any 386 was outdated by the time WWW access was available to the masses.

But I did use a Mac II to access the web and it did work a whole lot better than my Amiga, sadly.

The Amiga's problem was that it was stuck with 386-era performance in the age of web browsers which demanded high colour depths — which the Amiga's internal chipset couldn't handle.

Ok, i thought you had some experience with Arachne or similar web browser under DOS. I recal Windows 3.11 in 16 color mode, probably 386DX@40MHz and Netscape - nothing fancy or spectacular when compared to A3000.

Problem with Amiga is UMA not present in PC world before Intel 810 chipset.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I pay NZ$89 per month today for internet with 'phone' (wireless) and it's capped (at 60GB mind you.

Ouch

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I doubt anyone could have used that much per month in 1997).

If that's gigabytes then it would take 105.39 days of constant downloading at 56k6 to get to that amount, or 13.17 days for gigabits

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TEG

You have a strange way of reading History.

The C128D was NOT here and the A1000 did NOT sell well. So retrospectively you can't say that.

I said could, not did. Sales of the A1000 were supposed to be much higher than they were. One possible factor in this is that Commodore concentrated on the US market, not realizing how much it was being taken over by PCs. If they had produced a PAL version at the same time and sold it in Europe, sales would probably have been much higher. But perhaps the introduction of the C128D in Europe in late 1985 would have eaten into A1000 sales there.

In late 1986 a 'cost reduced' version of the C128D with metal case and 8568 VDC was introduced in North America. According to Wikipedia,

When the C128(D/DCR) was discontinued in 1989, it was reported to cost nearly as much to manufacture as the Amiga 500, even though the C128D had to sell for several hundred dollars less to keep the Amiga's high-end marketing image intact.

Bil Herd has stated that... "I only expected the C128 to be sold for about a year, we figured a couple of million would be nice and of course it wouldn’t undercut Amiga or even the C64". After Commodore raised the price of the 64 for the first time by introducing the redesigned 64C in 1986, its profit from each 64C sold was reportedly much greater than that from the C128.

Originally Posted by TEG

As the mother board was cleverly design from the start to be the same for the C128 and the C128D, it would have not cost much to arrange the production line to output both of the product. 90% of the line would have been shared.

And yet,

According to Bil Herd, head of the Hardware Team (a.k.a. the "C128 Animals")...Working to release two models at the same time had increased the risk for on-time delivery

Originally Posted by TEG

I would only have, eventually, provide the 8563 VDC with its whole 64 Ko RAM, so being able to display 16 colours, instead the 16 Ko for the C128 and so the 4 colours.

Which is what they did with the 8568 VDC in the C128DCR.

We have to remember that Jack was no more here at the time and so Gould was the manager. He simply had no clue.

And yet the widely panned 264 series (C16, Plus 4) was Jack's idea.

Maybe Gould didn't have clue. But it shouldn't be up the CEO of a company to decide by himself what products to produce beyond broad brush-strokes. The Amiga was clearly the future, and should have taken priority over an older 8 bit machine with leftover video chip and Z80 mashed into it.

And when you think of it, the R&D cost was absolutely low, the team who designed the machine was incredibly small.

Low it may have been, but any R&D diverted from the Amiga just delayed its development. The 2 year wait from 1985 to 1987 was almost too long. Some say it was too long. Perhaps if that team had been working on the Amiga instead of the C128...

Bil Herd explain there was nobody to say them what to do. The management was completely off the mark and so that was engineers who decided what to do of the energy they had in their veins.

There may be some truth in that. If so it simply highlights the fact the C128 was a mistake.

Not that I'm complaining mind you. The more designs Commodore was able to bring to fruition the more interesting it was and is for home/retro computer fans.

[qz3fwd]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Wow. I pay NZ$89 per month today for internet with 'phone' (wireless) and it's capped (at 60GB mind you. I doubt anyone could have used that much per month in 1997).

Every month when my “Unlimited” Verizon hits ~24GB bandwidth consumed i time travel to the mid 1990’s and experience todays modern internet at the glacial dial up modem speed of yesteryear. Those days were much simpler.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Yes, they did. Most ISA bus cards were painfully slow in 256 colors.

Still, that was the mode used by PC users, because at least it wasn't as painfully slow as 256 colours in AGA, which also slowed down your serial port.

But I browse the web today on TV in 8 colors, and it's fine. IBrowse does an amazing job of dithering images to make them viewable. If I want to view a jpeg in true color I download it and view it separately in HAM8.

I didn't use 8 colours even back in those days because it looked like an insult to the eye.

The images on most web pages are just eye candy. In the old days this was recognized, and web page designers tried to keep them to a minimum to save precious bandwidth and speed up loading times. When a page might take minutes to load at the best of times this was rather important. The user might not bother if it took too long (an all too frequent occurrence).

That was never the case. People were just as impatient back then — if not even more since one had to pay by the minute — and wouldn't come back to a page that took minutes to render.

Here's a typical website from 1996 (via "The Old Internet"):-

PC Gamer - the World's Bestselling PC and CD-ROM Games Magazine

All the images are GIFs, and most are 'thumbnail' size to reduce bandwidth. This page would look fine in 16 colors.

It wouldn't if you had functioning vision. My school got mid-range PCs with 133 Pentium CPUs and SVGA screens connected to a broadband link in 1997. Even on a modem, 256 colours was a minimum display depth — which triggered Amiga users' adoption of RTG cards — for the absolute majority of internet users. Otherwise, images would have been optimised for 16 colours instead of the 242 colour internet "standard".

People often browsed with images turned off to speed up page loading. Before the advent of javascript etc., only text links and image maps were clickable. Most websites avoided image maps, so you could do everything with images turned off. A lot of amateur sites were plastered with animated GIFs too that were very annoying, another reason to turn them off!

People often pressed the "stop" button when enough had been loaded, but people most often did not browse with images turned off.

The Surf Squirrel was released in 1996, when Amiga Technologies was still selling A1200s. Before that there wasn't much need for a buffered serial port because most people had slower MODEMs, and very few were on the internet. We did frequent bulletin boards a lot though, and once we got internet ftp sites, newsgroups, and email. These tasks didn't need more than 8 colors.

Only Amiga users needed care about colour depth because 256 colours was already a baseline in 1996 — or we would see internet GIFs optimised for lower colours depths.

You might void your warranty installing a clockport serial card, but most people's A1200s were out of warranty by then. A dealer could install it legally if you were worried about it. Big box Amigas didn't have a problem with opening the case under warranty because they were designed to have cards installed by the user.

Most Amiga users never had big boxes. Whereas all PC users did.

Now might also be be good time to point out that 'serious' Amiga users often had big box machines like the A2000, A3000 and A4000, stuffed with accelerator and I/O cards and even RTG. In the late 90's I had an A3000 with 50MHz 060, 32MB RAM, Ethernet (on ADSL) and Picasso II RTG. I could surf the web just as well as any Pentium PC, except for Netscape specific stuff (so much for the HTML 'standard'!).

That's an Amiga problem. If you didn't get an A4000 or A3000 with RTG card or spend an equal amount on an A1200 tower rebuild, you had better just get a PC and drop the Amiga altogether. And even so, you still couldn't reach Netscape "standard".

Since Commodore exited the scene in 1994, before the internet took off, 'Amiga diehards' were the only ones browsing the web on the Amiga anyway. But many of us were happy enough doing it slightly slower with less colors, and so didn't need a new serial port. I started with a 14400 MODEM, then 28k8, and finally 33k6. That was fast enough for me.

Funny, I upgraded to k56flex and V.34 because lost bps means lost money.

Did you use it? Do you still use it today?

I would do, if my house weren't totally wireless, so I'm using Neil Cafferkey's Prism2 driver instead nowadays. But it has been very useful for a long time.

Yeah who cares. Perhaps I should have kept the driver to myself so everybody would think you needed an expensive Amiga specific card.

I actually think it prolonged the useful life of several Amigas, so I don't think that would have been a good idea.